Disclaimer: I didn't click on link or read the paper yet.
Concentration is amount/volume, and if the volume (denominator) is less than 1 unit of whatever (which it is) the concentration will be a higher number than the total amount. But yeah, the whole "local concentration at injection site" comment is kind of weird, and I dont really see how it is relevant, because the compound will quickly diffuse.
Also, using immortal cell lines to do early stage in vitro experiments for experimental therapeutics is fine. But yeah, you can only take so much from the results, because the therapeutic may react very differently with normal cells in vivo.
Last edited by Kalam; 03-03-2022 at 08:21 PM.
Yea i understand that and it's super standard. It's just you can only use that number in isolation or to compare it with other numbers that are standardized in a similar manner. It's the extending that to make a claim about local concentration for about 2 seconds before it disperses that's odd.
I didn't mention it before but i believe they used that 100 µg/ml number to decide their testing concentrations. Roughly 1/100 active parts found their way to the liver with previous mRNA vaccines (they also mention rats, but that's a whole other issue where distance from injection site to liver make those numbers fairly useless). They used 0.5µg ,1µg ,2µg for testing. Or half of the average, the average and double the average. And they use cells from a tumor to make claims for how it behaves with liver cells. Liver isn't a small organ to begin with, but tumors aren't exactly included. Even using any non cancerous liver cells the sane concentrations of the vaccine in the culture is insanely small.
The fairly short paper just reads like it was made for clickbait headlines to people that can't read what/how they're actually measuring/testing. Reading the abstract and 4. Discussion part is roughly enough.
It is very possible in those very specific in vitro conditions there is DNA integration, and in the real world it isn't an issue. At this point it shouldn't be too hard to take cellular DNA from people that have had up to 4 doses of Pfizer vaccine and test those cells to see if:
a. There was reverse transcription and DNA integration of the vaccine mRNA, and
b. Resulting increased gene expression
If it is a real concern, we should be seeing some data from in vivo cells. I don't think that is the type of data the medical community could suppress, even if they wanted to. The experiment is too easy to do. I haven't worked in a lab in 10 years and I could do the experiment if you gave me some cells, a DNA purification kit, primers and a PCR machine.
How did the science change seemingly overnight?
It didn't? Likely they just changed the scale. For pre omicron days that map was semi useful. It's been pretty useless for omicron the last 2 months. It's just been shades of red everywhere.
Omicron cases in general are a lot less dangerous, but there are like 4x of them compared to say delta (that was also more infectious). So if you wanted to map "hot spots", then there's a problem when red means more than 1k/per100k cases (totally random numbers) and every county breaks that. So you need to change the scale.
Just think of it like a weather map where the "hottest" color is used when it's warmer than -30 celsius (-22 fahrenheit).
I haven't ever worked in a lab and know barely anything about molecular biology, but even to me the paper just seemed strange and unnecessary.
I assume Huh7 is at least cheap, but the amount of noise it creates can't be worth anyone's time to weed out. Single donor tumorigenic cell line sounds like a nightmare for anything that isn't related to cancer or drug toxicity. Even for those it's just a quick test(s) to find a binary answer before you start using something more appropriate.
I can see someone using it for a student paper or teaching purposes. And obv i don't have anything against using hepatoma cell lines in general. Cost and availability alone justify it.
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Chaps' 2017-18 NFL $$ Thread
LOL Vox
As usual, it's a left-wing propaganda piece, dressed up in language of pseudo-neutrality.
At the 5:05 mark, they think they're making a clever point that 40% of all Democrats trust a bunch of different news sources (CNN, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, NY Times, etc), but that 40% of all conservatives "only" trust Fox News. While that's not even accurate (they're leaving off non-mainstream news sources which conservatives follow), let's ignore that for now. Even the point their making is basically a self-own.
Why don't conservatives trust networks like CNN, PBS, and NPR? Why don't they trust the NY Times? Is it the fault of conservatives? Or is it the fault of the producers of content of those sources, which made the conscious decision about 7 years ago to become hyper-biased to the point of driving almost all conservative readers away?
This is actually an indictment of the US mainstream media. It's showing that every major news source has moved to become left wing propaganda, leaving conservatives only with Fox News.
There's also the problem of left wing COVID misinformation and bias. It's not even like CNN was telling the truth about COVID the whole way, and conservatives just weren't listening due to previous issues with them. The mainstream media was also highly left-biased about COVID.
That's why so many conservatives refused (and still refuse) to believe that the vaccines were a huge positive -- especially in 2021 before Omicron became dominant, and especially for people over 45. They were hit with so much bullshit and hypocrisy about COVID from the mainstream media, they tuned out an actual true message about the vaccine.
Classic case of the boy who cried wolf. Who do we blame here? The people who didn't believe the boy when an actual wolf showed up, or the boy for lying?
It may or may not be an issue. That's the problem. You are too confidently ruling out T cell exhaustion from every-6-month COVID vaccines. It's still being looked at, but presently it's an unknown.
Now, if the fourth shot were as effective as the third shot, there's still enough reward from it to make that risk worth taking at this point.
However, it looks like the fourth shot just gives you a little more protection, and doesn't do what the third shot did. In fact, it was found that the third shot was more than just a "reset" of the clock. It also produced higher quality (and more numerous) antibodies than the second shot did. In lab studies, it was found that people four weeks following their second shot had significantly less protection than people four weeks following their 3rd shot. I'm an anecdotal success story, dodging COVID both in November (in the same room with me for 11 hours per day at WSOP) and January (in the same house as me).
The fourth shot is basically a fail. It seems like it might only be useful for those who are immunocompromised enough not to have generated a proper immune response to the three previous shots. This makes the risk/reward ratio a very different story than previous shots made available to the public.
I think it is a scientifically viable in vitro experiment. I have read a lot about mRNA technology, and have never read anything about possible reverse transcription; so it is interesting from a scientific perspective to see that it can possibly happen; albeit under very artificial circumstances.
Also, immortal cell lines are widely used to do early stage in vitro experiments. Nothing wrong with doing a basic experiment using them. I dont think the authors of this paper were expecting it to end up in Nature (a very prestigious journal). If not for the political clickbait ramifications of the research, it probably would have just ended up in some lower end journal with no fanfare, and that would be that.
The truth is much (if not most) scientific research will turn out to be useless in the end. But it is very hard to tell what will ultimately be useful. So there is a ton of basic research, most of it that will ultimately be useless, and then it is the job of entrepeneurs/biotech companies to sift through it all and figure out what is useful and can be monetized and what isn't. For good or bad that is kind of the model for publicly funded scientific research.
My own research was very basic scientific research. And although I found it interesting, I never saw any way to use it to do something useful. But the research is on PubMed for anyone to see for all perpetuity, and who is to say whether someone else will ultimately use it to do something useful.
Last edited by Kalam; 03-05-2022 at 05:54 PM.
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